8/14/2019 Learn-Streaming for Personal Learning Networks

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LEARN-STREAMING SUPPORT FOR PERSONAL LEARNING NETWORKS

Oskar Casquero, Javier Portillo, Ramn Ovelar, Manuel Benito, Jess Romo, UPV/EHU, Spain

In Learning Management Systems (LMS), students are assigned to closed virtual classrooms that focus theinteraction with only those learning resources located there. Communication tools (such as forums, mailingservices and blogs), when restricted to the closed space of the platform, do not fit with all the interactions needsof the learning community, specially long-term interactions, and do not allow to link external services. Moreover,Moodle-alike platforms do not completely suit the requirements of the European Space for Higher Education(ESHE) and life-long learning. On one hand, geographical mobility, credit transfer and competence assessmentinvolved in the new learning approach encourages opening up learning systems in order to facilitate theinteraction with web services and people inside and outside the institution. On the other hand, learners should beable to retain their contents (evidences of acquired competences) out of a virtual classroom in order to build their

personal e-portfolio and curriculum vitae.

Within all learning environments, we think that the model based on a Personal Learning Network (PLN) [1] is the

one that best accomplishes life-long learning and ESHEs goals. In a PLN, every learner uses a PersonalLearning Environment (PLE) that assists him searching, retrieving, reusing, editing, sharing and publishing DigitalLearning Resources (DLR) such as posts, images, videos and learning objects. A PLE is designed as a mash-upof personalized services, both institutional and external, that reflects individual learning preferences andcollaborative work, and tracks the learn-streaming of the student. The key artefacts that enable the release ofdata and web applications are syndication channels (RSS, ATOM) and widgets within a PLE. Therefore, theinstitution could offer syndication channels and decoupled widgets for interaction with internal web services, andlearners could decide which context (PLE) to integrate in (GMail, iGoogle, Netvibes,). Nevertheless, theinstitution can also provide of a pre-configured but flexible context in the form of a PLE.

Learn-streaming simply means publishing and sharing daily learning activities that constitute life-long learning. Itallows students to keep track of what they have done on-line. Institutions can benefit from it as learn-streaming

allows to look up the individual activity of the students for curriculum purposes. The aggregation of the learn-streaming of every student allows the teacher to get a detailed picture of the progress achieved by him or her in aparticular course or subject. The solution explored in this paper suggests a Network of Blogs for supporting learn-streaming storage.

The Network of iBlogs is released as loosely-

coupled service within the mashup-basedframework of the PLN. The nodes that make up

this network are iBlogs (a.k.a. invisible blogs),which are the containers for learn-streaming. As itcan be seen in the figure, the basic architecture

for the Networks of iBlogs considers one blog per

subject (teacher and students) and one blog (e-portfolio) per person (teacher or student). Thisblogs communicate with each other and with the

PLEs through syndication mechanisms.

References

1. CASQUERO, O.; PORTILLO, J.; OVELAR, R.; et.al. (2008). iGoogle and gadgets as a platform for integratinginstitutional and external services In First International Workshop on Mashup Personal LearningEnvironments (Retrieved December 11, 2008, from http://tinyurl.com/5kcsew)